so its best to make a copy of the latest savegame before using this patch?
i take it you cannot say how early next year this issue will be patched.
i did a couple of taxi missions and since then ive noticed that the combat gos stupidly slow when i fire weapons at close range, namely the repeater gun armed ones

EDIT: No sorry apparently not. This particular fps issue will have to wait on a further patch that will require integration and testing to make sure that it doesn't cause other unforeseen errors elsewhere.

The test patch I did on page 2 of this thread disabled all generic missions even though only the taxi missions were the targets (nested comment problem). I later went back and took out specific missions only, with result that only removing virtually all of them got the fps close to TC standards.

There's a possibly related issue in TC with the convoy generic missions (escort- and destroy-). The longer you play, the lower the fps. In fact it wasn't just the time you played, not how many missions you accepted, but how many different missions were offered. To trigger a generic mission offer, fly into a sector with at least one station whom you are not an enemy of. At least one of the convoy missions can also be offered from a ship. Back then I experimented with flying in and out of a gate quickly in a Jaguar, and was able to bring fps down to single digits after a few minutes of "gate punching". The patch I did then was simply to stop these two missions from being offered. This has worked well in TC for me the last 6 months or so. I experimented with removing more generic mission types on TC, and while I did find that some fps increase was possible, that it was nowhere near the scale of the convoy missions issue, and definately nowhere near the scale of the issue we're now experiencing in Albion Prelude. Even the generic mission types that I never accepted, I left in for my own game.

The fact that the AP issue seems to effect some people but not others I find intruiging. Why is this so? It mattered not for TC, whether you accepted any particular mission type or not. I believe now that the thing that differed between players which resulted in some having a major issue or a hardly noticable one, is how many times the player flies into a sector with stations that get to offer generic missions.

While it looks doubtful that the AP fps issue is the old TC generic mission issue amplified, it would be nice if they actually were, and that an official fix for AP will also remove the convoy mission issue which I assume was passed on from TC (difficult/impossible to test as it's no longer the dominant fps issue). I'm still disappointed that TC wasn't patched for the convoy mission issue now, but having the fps issues fixed in AP will be welcome.

Is there any way to verify that this exact issue is the cause of slowdown by using the script editor debugger or something?

My game was silky smooth at maximum settings when I started out, but after about 53 hours of play (real-time) it's really starting to chug even in quiet sectors or while staring into space.
It's most noticable in the laggy response to input in the menus and so on.

Combined with the slowdown caused by weapon collisions (and their visual effects, such as with the PAC) that hasn't been fixed since X3R the game is gradually becoming unplayable in combat situations, even on a powerful machine.

Specs:
i7 920 @ 4GHz
6GB RAM
GTX 580

Is there anything that we the afflicted players can do to alleviate this problem in the meantime, short of starting a new game?
'January' is a vague date for a fix to an issue that makes the game unplayable; And waiting for the guts of a month to come back to the game is likely to just put me off bothering with AP altogether.

(I understand that we're just a few days from Christmas and that the devs have their own lives to lead and families to be with over the next couple of weeks - But if there's any kind of solution available to this issue it'd be greatly appreciated.)

From the sounds of it, this is an issue with scripts not terminating properly and building up over time. The mission-offer-on-entering-system script is just one of those scripts. Probably not every script is affected, but some are, and even one script is enough to cause a buildup.

The issue is more pronounced in X3:AP because of all the additional scripts involved in the war scenario, the stock market, and whatever else. More faulty scripts running means faster buildup and intolerable frame rate quicker. Apparently the script stack is saved to the save file, because it comes back immediately upon reload of an affected saved game. Evaluating those save files should provide some insight into which scripts are affected.

I suspect the only reason why not everyone is reporting having this problem is the "boiled frog" scenario: the frame rate drops so gradually that many players simply get used to it without noticing, probably mentally attributing it to their growing empire size. In other cases, players will have restarted new X3 games (or went to play some other game) before the FPS became uncomfortable. However, in Albion Prelude, the rate of accumulation is fast enough that the FPS drop becomes significant too quickly.

It will be a great day for Albion Prelude and Terran Conflict when this bug is quashed. I imagine that we will suddenly discover that those large fleet battles later into the game are a lot faster because they had been slowed down by all the scripts built up while we were earning our fortunes to get those big ships.

Last edited by geldonyetich on Wed, 21. Dec 11, 11:24; edited 5 times in total

I seem to be having the exact same issue. I'm used to X-series to slowdown a notch or two when you get into the game a bit... But it's starting to be so slow that going to a gate on SETA x10 makes me pass through without jumping Even on empty sectors!

I will post my dxdiag *if* I happen to find this issue even after doing the regular codec-cleanup I'm so used to already... However, a new gamestart and all's quite smooth 'n nice. PS. I haven't done a single Taxi mission, but I have done a lot of Roid scanning missions (easy rep and money while flying fast M5 ) and have put a ton of satellites. Have few UT's running about and few factories/mines as well, nothing huge. iirc about 15 hours in the game and pretty largely explored universe, except for the north-eastern parts.

I didn't notice about the save game size, but I wasn't really looking into it either...

Setup, for reference. Shouldn't be because of not enough hardware now should it? CPU load is below 70% at peaks (for one core, that's utilized) so there's plenty to go on. GFX load is apparently lower, since the automatic cooler RPM goes to near-zero while in X3AP, but the same can't be said from X3TC in which GFX is definately under higher load, even if I maxed both out?.

As it happens we already know which missions are involved and have a good idea which ones are likely to cause the most problems, hence the advice that the Taxi missions are the worst affected. The problem is specific to X3AP and cannot happen (or at least not for the same reason) in X3TC.

As it happens we already know which missions are involved and have a good idea which ones are likely to cause the most problems, hence the advice that the Taxi missions are the worst affected. The problem is specific to X3AP and cannot happen (or at least not for the same reason) in X3TC.

The real problem to date for myself as a player has been in getting Egosoft to accept that the issue is real. I do understand that for every complaint acted on, there must be many more where the issue is assumed already known, or that there is no issue in Egosofts opinion. Back in April you (CBJ) and Xenonslayer responded to my post in tech support regarding TC lag which got worse purely from moving sector to sector. I sent in a TC save in which even the fastest PC available could not achieve any more than 1 to 4 fps. In the save, the only thing that the player had done was to fly through a gate many times. I made a patch available for download which got around most of this, albeit at the cost of disabling certain generic mission types. ES hasn't patched TC for this.

These threads all came from page #1 of TC/AP tech support at time of writing. Whatever happened in this thread, it seems has also completely changed ES's responses to Albion Prelude lag complaints from "check drivers" etc to "we're working on it".

As a player I couldn't care less whether it's ABC generic mission or XYZ generic mission that has been causing late game lag in X3. As a player I just want the problem eliminated so I can have fun in late game as well as early game. A promise to fix sometime next year when I'm back at work isn't exactly the same. Egosoft cannot use the excuse that it was unaware of late game lag. The message may not have got to those that make the decision to assign a dev to do the fix, but I know for a fact that it got through to Xenonslayer and when it comes to generic missions, I understand he's the man.

Using google to reveal global opinions:
Using a series of google searches, one can quantify associations between terms. Of the 66,200,000 webpages that contain both "unreal" and "game", 2,950,000 of them also contain the word "laggy". So that's 4.4 percent. If we try the same but exchange unreal for egosoft, (3090000 / 3480000 ) * 100 = 88.79 percent. When you enter your search terms, make sure that you use a "+" in front of every term, which tells google that it's not optional. Be aware that google does some filtering, for example duplicate pages are not counted by default, and it thinks that in some pages "slow" can be counted as if it was "laggy". But it's still a useful too for gathering stats. Advanced google search has nice options for stats gathering.

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